


The Music We Know in Dreams

by sahiya



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, F/M, TARDIS shenanigans, Timey-Wimey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-25
Updated: 2013-07-25
Packaged: 2017-12-21 06:56:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/897217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sahiya/pseuds/sahiya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Maybe the best thing about River’s mum and dad was that neither of them ever asked her what she was going <i>do</i> with a degree in cultural anthropology.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Music We Know in Dreams

**Author's Note:**

  * For [veleda_k](https://archiveofourown.org/users/veleda_k/gifts).



> Thanks to Fuzzyboo for beta reading!

Maybe the best thing about River’s mum and dad was that neither of them ever asked her what she was going _do_ with a degree in cultural anthropology. Her program at Oxford was full of students whose parents wished they were reading for economics or law. But not River’s. River’s parents knew that she would figure it out. 

And figure it out she did, even if it meant deciding that she wanted to be an archeologist, a decidedly less-than-sensible career. She took a first in anthro and got herself on a dig in Italy her very first summer out of university - or, rather, the summer between her BA and her MA. She expected to get a first there, too, and then it’d be on to the PhD.

The dig was located fifty miles from anywhere. It was miserably hot. It was extremely dusty. And the work, which involved dusting off and cataloguing shards of Roman pottery, was tedious beyond belief. River loved it.

Well . . . it might not have been _it_ that she loved, so much as it was _him._

Professor John Smith - known to everyone at the dig as simply “the Professor,” as though he were the only one - was brilliant. River had already known that when she’d signed on to the dig. She’d managed to get a tutorial with him in her final year, which was how she got on the dig at all. He was brilliant and just a bit mad - exactly how River liked her men. She also suspected she might be developing a slight fetish for tweed and bow ties (and how he managed to wear such things in this heat, she had no idea). 

So far she’d managed to keep her embarrassing little crush under wraps. The Professor was oblivious, but the postgrads on the dig weren’t, and they already eyed River sideways for being the youngest person there. The last thing she wanted was to give them more ammunition.

She kept her head down, did her work, and absorbed knowledge like a sponge. Before she knew it, August had arrived. There were less than two weeks left before they were scheduled to return to the U.K. River would have a couple weeks at home in Leadworth with her mum and dad, and then it was back to Oxford. 

The last four days had been the the hottest of the summer. In fact, it’d been so hot that they’d called off work that afternoon, worried that people might end up with heatstroke. Now, at almost ten o’clock at night, it was finally cool enough in the main work-tent that River thought she might be able to get something done. She had a backlog of items to catalogue, but she thought she could clear it if she worked until midnight or so. 

She wasn’t expecting anyone else to be there. The postgrads had all taken one of the lorries into the nearest town for pizza and wine. None of them had invited her along, but River was used to that by now. Mostly it didn’t bother her. She liked her work, and if she plugged herself into her iPod and listened to music while she did it, she hardly noticed time passing at all. 

It was probably because she was plugged in, listening to the soundtrack to _Les Mis_ for the millionth time, that it took her so long to realize she was being watched. When she finally glanced up, she almost fell out of her chair in shock. 

“Professor!” she said, tearing her earbuds out. 

“River Song,” he said, smiling. River valiantly suppressed the little shiver she got whenever he said her name. It should’ve been weird, how he always said the whole thing, but she liked it. “Good evening.”

“What are you doing here?” she blurted. He raised his eyebrows at her, and she flushed. “Sorry,” she said, “it’s your dig, of course you can be here, I just - I didn’t think you _would_ be, so late.”

“I wouldn’t be,” he said, “except I didn’t get anything done this afternoon.”

“Right,” she said, with a nervous laugh, “neither did I. I guess no one did, really.”

“And yet,” he said, seating himself at the other end of the work table, “you and I are the only ones here. Funny about that. Very funny.”

“I guess,” she said. “Do you want me to go?”

“Go?” he said. “Why would I want that? I’m paying you to be here, aren’t I? Wait,” he added, frowning. “ _Am_ I paying you? I’d hate to think I wasn’t paying my hardest worker.”

River smiled. “You’re paying me. And I like to work.”

“Me too,” he said with a grin, and slid down the bench to sit right across from her. “What’ve you got there?”

“Just some pottery. Nothing special.”

“Never decide that,” he told her, a sharp note in his voice. She glanced at him in surprise, but he was looking intently at the piece of pottery she’d been cataloguing. “Never decide something isn’t special until you’ve really looked at it. You never know what you might turn up in a pile of pottery shards that second-rate archeologists decided weren’t worth anything.”

She flushed again. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” he said. “You’re just starting. It’s your job not to know these things, and it’s my job to teach you. Isn’t that how it works?”

“I suppose so.”

He put the pottery down on the table. He had lovely hands, she noticed, if a bit dirty around the nail-beds. But it was hard to keep your hands totally clean on the dig. “You’re coming back to Oxford in the autumn, aren’t you? You’re doing the taught MA.”

“Yes,” she said, smiling. And then, seeing her opening, she asked, “Would you have room in your schedule for a tutorial?”

“I’m afraid I’ll be here for Michaelmas,” he said, rising from the bench. “But you should see me in the Hilary term.”

“I will,” River said, straightening her spine. Hilary term was always terrible, wet and cold and dreary, but she might not dread it so much this year, with a tutorial with the Professor to look forward to. 

She put her earbuds back in, when the Professor went over to his work bench, but she didn’t turn _Les Mis_ back on. The Professor hummed to himself as he worked. It wasn’t music, exactly. It was something ethereal, something she somehow both knew and didn’t know. She’d heard it before somewhere. In a dream, maybe . . .

***

_“River, River. River, open your eyes. Come on, now.”_

River opened her eyes, blinking slowly. Above her, the Doctor hovered. “Ow,” she said.

“There you are,” the Doctor said, looking relieved. “How’re you feeling?”

She grimaced. “As I just said: _ow_.”

“Right,” he said. “Here.” He pressed a hypospray to the crook of her arm. “That should take the edge off. I have tea for when you’re ready.”

“Thanks,” she said. “In a little bit.” She realized she was in her own bed - well, their own bed, not that they generally used it for sleeping. Where the memory of how she ended up there should have been, there was nothing. “What happened?”

“Slight TARDIS mishap,” the Doctor said, frowning. “You were helping me replace the temporal stabilizers, and you got shocked. You were out for almost two hours, I was starting to get worried.”

“No need to worry,” she told him, reaching up to caress his face. He caught her wrist and kissed her palm. “I’ll be right as rain in a bit. But that does explain . . .”

He raised her eyebrows at her. She experienced a moment of startling deja vu. “What?”

“I had a dream. A very vivid one.”

He shifted. “Timelines?”

“Maybe. You were there.” 

He relaxed. “Probably not, then. Probably it was just a normal dream.”

“Mmm,” she said. Probably that was the case, she thought, as she allowed the Doctor to ply her with tea and chocolate biscuits, because he never remembered that she liked ginger nut better. Chocolate was all right, though, especially when the Doctor sprawled out next to her in bed and ate them with her. 

It didn’t make sense, after all. There were an almost infinite number of Amy’s and Rory’s out there, some of them with children, but those children would never be River. River hadn’t even been River when she’d been born. She’d regenerated twice before becoming who she was now. Her dream made no sense. 

And yet . . . something bothered her. She couldn’t put her finger on it until after the Doctor had left her alone to take the tea tray back to the kitchen. Then it occurred to her all at once. 

She’d never heard the music from _Les Mis._

_Fin._


End file.
